Calvin's birthday - April 7th - 8th

This is the post I've been working on the past few days. Unfortunately, this stomach virus has made it hard, but it's more or less done.

This is a long list of pictures showing Calvin, for his birthday, April 7 - 8th --

yes, his birth date spans two days, thanks to the International Dateline. It was still the 7th when I called back to the States about him being born, but it was already the 8th here.

Some very minor comments, I'm not going to write much...

They're all in more or less the correct order, but the first picture, is, of course, of Calvin inside the tummy.

Most of the kids here, when you ask them how old they are, you subtract a year from the answer they give you because when they come out, they're considered to be already one year old, so they start counting from one instead of zero.

So, Calvin's about nine months old in that picture...

The rest are pretty straight forward... there is a gap of about 6 months...

That's before and during the NYC period,-- I think I was too emotionally drained, still, from the birth and months after it to take any pictures during that whole time -- we only picked up taking pictures a bit before we left again for Taiwan... Those are down at the bottom, of him in the park...

Besides, I mostly wanted to post some older pictures of him, some or most of which you may not have seen.

Also, you can see that he actually looks pretty "good" while in the hospital. It was when he came home that you can see the effects of those two battles with infection that he went through, the second of which we thought for sure was going to kill him for a few days.

he lost all of his baby fat and has never really gotten it back... he's got muscles now, but he's still quite, quite skinny. he didn't gain weight for I can't remember how long. They were going to re-admit him for a while, but Gosia fought to get food into him, and he did eventually start gaining little by little.

And he screamed constantly, too. We were talking about it earlier today, and Gosia says, he was letting it all out. He was in severe emotional pain back then, plus the seizures and all else...

It's pretty amazing what humans can go through and deal with.

The pictures of Eli and Rhiannon with the I'm the big sister and I'm the big brother T-shirts are from the first time they got to really see him, about three weeks after he came out.

Anyway, that about sums it up. This Sunday, to continue the (belated) birthday celebrations, I'll be posting a series of movies we took back then that I'm assuming most of you haven't seen or may like to see again...

See you then, and thank you all for the notes and e-mails about Calvin, then and now.
They always mean a LOT,
Thank you so much.